Blogging at home and abroad

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The Lowy poll results on how Australians get their news about international events was certainly sobering for those of us working in online media, but how does that figure look compared to polling from overseas?

To recap the Lowy poll result, we asked where people get their international news, with 34% saying they often or sometimes used blogs and other online sources (online newspapers were a separate category):

Now take a look at these results from the public relations firm Edelman, from their 2007 Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere. Keep in mind, this survey is broader, in that it asks about readership of all blogs, not just those dedicated to international news or current events. But in another sense it is narrower, in that it asks strictly about blogs, excluding the 'other online sources' we referred to in our question:

It certainly does look as if Australia is way down the list, but the problem is that the Edelman table is unclear about frequency of blog readership. So the extremely high figure for Japan, for instance, might just refer to those who look at a blog once a month or even less.

UPDATE: It's pretty clear from this Edelman press release that the 'Read blogs' column in the table above refers to reading blogs 'at least once a week'.